User blog:Muhlakai/Skills you need to learn first in TEC
Introduction The Ember Conflict can be a bit of a culture shock for new players. It could be easy for a new cadet to assume that TEC lacks depth or options for commanders. After all, *Grizzled RTS vets might be taken aback by the lack of base building. *Turn-based strategy fans might wonder why there's no tech tree. *MOBA warriors might assume that the wide open army construction means that you won't need to specialize in the use of one unit or another. *FPS addicts might assume that "real-time strategy" means that if you'll either be bored or bad at the game if you don't practice a specific keyboard build sequence until your fingers look like you have twitch problems. ...and most tablet gamers are going to assume, as has been true in the past, that RTS on a mobile device is going to be clunky, slow, and not smooth. (Side note: I'm a huge proponent of the concept that TEC is less a game of strategy, but rather one of tactics. This plays a huge role in how playable it is on a mobile screen.) And to be fair, the tutorial isn't going to help too much. After all, it's there to teach you the basics of the controls and game. Sure, it'll give you some encounters with other players who are as shallow into the game as you, but the sheer quantity of depth in the game does not become apparent until a few hours in. This article will hopefully give you a glimpse at what gameplay skills you want to work towards after you finish the tutorial. 1st: Ignore anything outside of the actual gameplay Gear sure does look interesting, doesn't it? And look at those specializations! Is it worth spending a bit of Ember to grab one or two of those units to start with? Oh, or what about the army management? Should you pick up a couple of units to start with to play with different armies? Please, step away from your screen before you hurt someone. When you start with TEC you're going to need to start by spending a good bit of time with just the first few units that the game gives you. There's a very simple reason for this, although I'll admit the reason seems discouraging: you don't have any idea how to use the units you have, so you don't have any idea what you might want to be buying! My suggestion: don't bother trying to buy anything until you're at least level 15. Learn to master the units you started with. The default gear is really good. You really don't want to change it. You might flip the greaves that the game had you craft back and forth from the breastplate the shield started with, but you don't need to be buying anything for a while. 2nd: Figure out how to keep all three units alive long enough to get reinforcements Play with which units are in your front line in Army Management. My recommendation? Shield/Ranger/Horse, just like the game started you with. ...but play around with it. Can you use two shields to keep the gorillaphant (er, siege beast) alive long enough to get more units? Can you use a doctor with something else to hold a CP (control point) long enough to claim it, bring out more units, and win? There's a twofold challenge here: doing well with the units you have means you'll get reinforcements slower than the other guy. So first you need to do well enough that they're getting their reinforcements first, then you need to do even better to keep your units alive long enough to let your own reinforcements help take you to victory. 3rd: Learn what makes your units different You need to start mastering the rock-paper-scissors cycle between units. Learn to stick your cavalry on their archers, your infantry on their cavalry, and your archers on their infantry. Then learn when to break that loop. Figure out when it's better to throw arrows at the cavalry who are being attacked by your infantry so that they die faster. The faster they die the faster you have a unit count advantage. (Meaning: you have more units than them.) Learn how to use your infantry and cavalry to block attacks against your archers. Figure out how far apart your units can get before they're too far apart to support each other. Until you learn that cavalry are NOT just faster shields, that shields are NOT only defensive units, and that your archers do NOT need to be kept as far from combat as possible you still haven't mastered what makes each of your units different. 4th: Stop thinking about gear. Buy only a few units. When you're experimenting with your army, try not to change more than one front-line and one reinforcement unit at a time. Play it for several matches across multiple maps, even if it's just against training AIs. What worked smoothly? What didn't work? Did you try to play the army exactly the same as the army you were using before? If you did, then you probalby did it wrong. Small changes in your units will often create large differences in how the army has to be played. When you changed a unit in your reinforcement line did you ever bring the new unit out? One of the tricks of reinforcements is that a unit doesn't have to be useful in as many different situations as a front-line unit, but it does have to be flexible. You can't afford to make each unit merely a "for this exact situation I use this guy" unit. Sure, you'll have some specialization in there, but a unit waiting for one special moment where it kicks butt isn't going to get pulled out as much as the unit that might not be as awesome for that one situation, but does fairly well in all of them. TEC is not a game of "here's the best unit for this job" so much as it's a game of "if I pull out this tool then perhaps I can use it to compliment what I've got going on on the field after I regroup/feint/distract/assault over here first and then move it into position, assuming that I can maintain a situation similar to what is happening right now." Don't think of TEC as a game of chess or even a game of miniatures. Think of it as a game of balancing on floating planks of wood. It's not the entire board on a strategic level that matters at the same time. What matters is several smaller, tactical encounters on the map (probably in different areas) that are all unfolding simultaneously. Side note: this is actually why you usually want to ignore gear so much. Gear tends to specialize your units into "awesome at one situation, crappy at others" soldiers who aren't as useful in as many situations. TEC is not a game about gear, but about the units themselves and what you can do with them. Gear can't move itself around the field and ultimately it's the moving around the field that is what will win your matches, so keep your focus on the units, not the gear. Only consider gear when you start hearing yourself say, "man, this horseman (or whatever) is totally what I need here, but I just wish that he could do X a little better..." 4-''and-a-halfth'': Don't be a stalker (of just one unit) Now you've bought a couple of units that are neat. You've got some even levelling up and specializing. Great! Now, stop watching them so closely. You have at least three units on the field most of the time. Make sure they're doing different things. You probably don't want them in three different areas of the map, but you do want them doing three different things. You also need to keep track of all of those things and then learn to track what your opponents are doing, too. You need to transition from watching one thing happen to watching multiple areas of the field develop. For instance, a 5 second window in your brain might look like this: My phalanx looks healthy but he's got that enemy Pride and Cav sucking him down. That's ok. Meanwhile I'd better stick my horsie on the Repeater to take him out. My back field is safe, is my gorillaphant ready? Nope. Oh, shoot! My Hcav isn't going to have captured the CP before the phalanx dies. If I send him over to help out right now will he get there in time? Nope. What if I move the phalanx towards the Hcav at the same time? Hmm. Siege beast ready, but my cav can't block both an enemy pride and cav from killing him. Better throw out that ranger I've been leveling up instead. If I'm lucky the ranger won't be enough of a target for them to go whack him before I can get the Hcav over in time to use both horses to screen the ranger for safety. If we're still fighting my next rein should be the gorillaphant. Oh, he's got a reinforcement! Good, it's just a doctor! I'll run my horsie over to bite his head off, change the move orders on my Hcav and ranger so they meet sooner, and then take the pair of them over to kill that Prideborn. Notice that different areas of the field end up supporting each other. Also: there's a plan in place for each unit not just for what needs to happen now, but what you expect to happen in the next few seconds. Extremely high-level play also has you figuring out what your opponent's plan is for each of their units. Also, don't pay attention to what you don't have yet or what you just lost. Those aren't important. What's important is what you have on the field right now. Reinforcements don't generally change the board for the first 5-10 seconds that they're down and by that point if you haven't already regrouped or otherwise taken control they won't be able to help you. (Also: bonus points if you figured out that the phalanx died about the time ''(probably just after) the ranger dropped in. How could you know? First, the ranger might have been bumped in because of the phalanx's death. If that's the case then the match is going VERY badly. If it was ready already, though, then the phalanx was going to be lost by the time the Hcav got over. So while the repeater probably died before the phalanx, the phalanx certainly didn't live long enough for the Hcav and ranger to meet or he would have been savable in the first place. Incidentally, if the phalanx died before the repeater then the Pride and enemy horse probably would have turned around and beat your horsie to a pulp before you sent yours over to the doctor.)' 5th: Stop trying to kill all of the opposing units, already! If you don't win almost as many games from capture as you do from crushing all of their units then you haven't figured out at least half of the game yet. That doesn't mean you're not good at the kill-everyone-and-burn-the-bodies side of things, just that you haven't mastered the other half. Winning in TEC requires that you're proficient enough with a sufficient number of tools that you can always pull something out of your belt. Most players don't learn how to use the CPs to win effectively. They'll charge after any units they think are exposed, exploiting a number advantage even as you slip another (often weaker) unit onto the CP and start to win. Stop thinking so much about how much damage you can do to your opponent and start thinking how you can move his units around the map where YOU want them (with his help). 6th: Start learning about your opponents You're going to start finding eventually that your strategies to crush a skilled foe can leave you open to the simple hacking of a less-experienced opponent. That's natural. You only have three pieces on the board to start with, after all, and if you're lucky you might still have two at the end, especially against an equal opponent. Learn to start reading your opponent's actions and choices in the first few seconds. What's she planning? Why does he think he needs two archers to face your shield? Where's that spitter going? Are these choices wise moves, are they feints designed to draw you into a trap where you're going to be bombed with a gorrilaphant, or are they foolish slips made by someone who didn't read your moves properly? You'll need to learn how to adjust your opening moves to take advantage of your opponent's errors quickly. Learn how to quickly double-team a unit he left alone without leaving your third unit cornered. Learn to use the trees to mask what you're doing but learn how to predict what he's likely to do when he does the same. (Hint: is he trying to be sneaky with how he uses the other pieces? If so, then he's trying to be sneaky with the hidden unit, too. In that case, don't expect that unit to show up where you might otherwise expect.) 7th: Play another match. Then another. And another. And another... You won't have learned everything in this game by level 20. ...or 30. ...or probably even at 100. TEC has an amazingly deep gameplay system with a list of tools and toys to play with that are only greatly expanded with the gear and specializations. So play another game. Play with armies you can't imagine ever working. Try to find some way to make them work anyhow. Reverse your reinforcement and front lines for a few matches. Then only switch one unit from each line back. Throw in units that you think are useless and play with them until you can figure out what they're good at. Then build an army around that "useless" unit. Play around with everything. And when you get tired of experimenting, go back to your "regular" army/armies. How did playing the experimental armies mess up how you typically play your regular army? There's so much to do you shouldn't run out of room to experiment before you come up with another idea to try. Hopefully this gives you some direction to start out with. Obviously, strategies and tactics vary. This also isn't a guide of "everything you need to know, EVAR." That said, following the points in more or less this order will help you learn the finer points of the game much faster than by trial and error. See you on the battlefield! Category:Blog posts Category:Strategy Category:Units Category:Walkthroughs